NEWS AND VIEWS: Another look at the language issue (08/20/00)

NEWS AND VIEWS

Another look at the language issue

by Bohdan Vitvitsky

Roman Karpishka's thoughtful analysis of the need for Ukraine to employ affirmative action-type principles in actively promoting the primacy of the Ukrainian language in Ukraine ("Ukraine Must Be Re-Ukrainianized," letter, August 6) is right on the mark. And the perspectives he offers not only as a Ukrainian-Canadian who frequently visits Ukraine but as a lawyer who practices in Montreal and who is thus familiar with the policies and practices applied to the promotion of the French language in Quebec are particularly valuable.

I am somewhat at a loss to understand why it is not yet obvious to everyone in Ukraine and the diaspora that Ukraine should - immediately and forcefully - employ a whole range of formal and informal policies to promote the primacy of the Ukrainian language. There are numerous reasons this should be done. The most obvious is that, since it is normal to hear French in France, and Russian in Russia, and Polish in Poland and so on, it should similarly be normal to hear Ukrainian in Ukraine.

But let me suggest three additional reasons that might not be quite as obvious.

First, why is language an issue at all in Ukraine? The principal reason has to do with the artificial suppression of the Ukrainian language by Ukraine's Russian colonizers. We all know about the tsarist policies that outlawed the use of Ukrainian dating back to the 19th century and the various Stalinist Russification campaigns beginning in the 1930s. But let me focus your attention on the much more recent past. In "The Press and Soviet Nationalities: The Party Resolution of 1975 and Its Implementation," a fascinating article first published in 1986 - fascinating both in itself and in relation to the discussion about language going on now - Prof. Roman Szporluk wrote about two much more recent campaigns to artificially suppress the use of Ukrainian and to artificially advance the use of Russian. The first campaign was launched without any official declarations after Petro Shelest was deposed as Ukraine's Communist boss (because he was viewed as being insufficiently anti-Ukrainian). It began in 1972 and was specifically directed against Ukrainian publications.

Then in 1975 Moscow decreed that the publication of and subscription to Russian-language periodicals should be expanded, and the publication of and subscription to all non-Russian language periodicals reduced. Ukrainian publications thus sustained a second hit almost immediately on the heels of the first. (As with everything else, the Soviets had a mechanism for controlling subscriptions in that all subscriptions to all periodicals had to be registered by being processed through a central subscription bureau, not by individual publications. And the press runs of individual publications could, of course, be controlled directly through the allocation of newsprint.)

As Dr. Szporluk explains, the first campaign against Ukrainian publications that began after Shelest was deposed resulted in the outright closings of numerous Ukrainian-language scholarly journals. Thus, for example, Ukrainian journals of geology, chemistry, physiology, biochemistry, physics and mathematics were closed altogether. And the press runs of the popular illustrated weekly Ukraina were reduced from a range of 300,000 to 360,000 per week in 1970 down to 120,00 to 124,000 by 1985.

The second campaign, the one directed at all of the non-Russian publications, began in 1975 and lasted for a decade. Dr. Szporluk shows that at the end of that decade, namely, when comparing publication figures for 1975 with those for 1984, total Ukrainian-language newspaper circulation decreased by about 8 percent while Russian newspaper circulation increased by 13 percent. Total Ukrainian-language journal circulation decreased by 18 percent (this was after many of the Ukrainian scholarly journals had already been closed down prior to 1975), while Russian-language journal circulation increased by 19 percent.

Special emphasis was placed on reducing access to Ukrainian publications in cities. In 1975 the Ukrainian-language Vechirnii Kyiv had a daily press run in Kyiv of 344,550. This was reduced to 200,000 in 1980. In 1983 a Russian version of the same paper appeared, and by 1985 approximately 100,000 copies of each was published. In Kharkiv the Ukrainian-language version of this same newspaper went from a circulation of 158,000 in 1979 down to 84,000 in 1980. And in Dnipropetrovsk Vechirnii Kyiv simply was replaced by a Russian newspaper. Apparently, an awful lot of Ukrainians forgot how to read Ukrainian overnight.

Second, Ukrainians should try to learn from others similarly historically situated. When Czecho-Slovakia was created after World War I, no one spoke Czech in Prague or in any of the other cities. Because of the many years of foreign rule, everyone spoke German (remember in which language Kafka wrote?). Then in the 1920s and 1930s the Czechs successfully embarked on a quiet campaign to eliminate the use of German and to promote the use of Czech. By the end of the 1930s, the predominant language in Prague and other cities in the Czech half of Czecho-Slovakia was Czech.

Third, there is an economic dimension to language use. Presently, various American and European magazines have either begun to publish or are planning to publish Eastern European native language versions of National Geographic, Cosmopolitan, Vogue and their European equivalents. When these periodicals publish in, for example, Hungarian or Czech, they make local investment in equipment and training in Hungary or the Czech Republic, and they also typically require that each national version of their magazine have a specified amount of local subject content - sometimes as high as 70 percent. Are any of these magazines publishing Ukraine-language versions of their periodicals? (Don't forget, Ukraine's population is much larger than that of Hungary or the Czech Republic.) Are they investing in Ukraine? Are they hiring and training Ukrainians, and writing about what's going on in Ukraine as regards fashion, or whatever else? No. Want to know why? Because the Russians publishers of the Russian-language versions of such magazines have convinced the magazines' home offices that their Russian-language version of the given magazine covers the Ukrainian market as well.

It is economic suicide for Ukraine not to ban the importation into Ukraine of international versions of magazines published in Russian. More importantly, it is linguistic and cultural suicide not to try and reverse the devastating effects of the decades and centuries of the various policies and campaigns to suppress, denigrate and destroy Ukrainian language and culture. Today the attempt to implement such reversals of past injustices is called affirmative action. But the Czechs did it even before the concept of affirmative action was invented. The Czechs apparently just thought it was common sense.

Dr. Szporluk's article has been reprinted in "Russia, Ukraine and the Breakup of the Soviet Union," a just published compilation of his writings over the last 30 years that is essential reading, and about which I hope to write in an upcoming issue of The Weekly.

Bohdan Vitvitsky is a lawyer, writer and lecturer who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and is a long-time contributor to The Ukrainian Weekly.

| Home Page |